Giving Delinquents a Horrible Sniff of a Filthy Future

“When you’re young, you’re arrogant,” Arthur Guerra is taunting. “You think you’re too cool. You think, ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ That’s what they thought. Now they’re here, in state issue.”

We’re in Department 5, Orange County Superior Court, the place where accused criminals come to be arraigned, the place with the filthy holding cells in the back--one for the men and the other for women.

Those categories are loose. You break the law in a big enough way and all of a sudden, you’re a man. Or a woman. Even if you’re really just a kid.

Right now the judge isn’t here. Neither are the marshals, the attorneys or the D.A. There’s just some criminals, and some parents and their kids. Most of them are scared.

This is the Shortstop juvenile diversion program on a Thursday night. About 700 children in Orange County pass this way every year.

Tonight’s kids, nine boys and six girls, are staring straight ahead, wide-eyed. They messed up and they got caught. That’s why they’re all here, even one who’s 12 years old. If they go through this program, their records are wiped clean. It costs them $35. This is their one chance.

Their cool is melting, slightly, around the edges. This is the group’s second and final three-hour session. Guerra, a youth counselor with the California Youth Authority, is in their face.

It’s going to get worse.

Guerra’s brought five of his “young men” from the California Youth Authority in Norwalk with him. That’s what he calls them to encourage their self-esteem.

Where they’ve come from, they’re called names that I can’t print. Inside CYA, where male criminals 12 to 25 years old do their time, the only respect anyone gets is born out of cold, hard fear.

They get beat on, robbed, slashed and raped. Some kill themselves. If you don’t have an attitude when you get there, you’d better get one fast. Everything’s divided along racial lines. You hang with your own color, even if they’re not your own kind.

Ronald’s a gangbanger from South-Central L.A., 21 years old. Used to wear the colors of the Rolling 60s Crips. Dropped out of school in the 10th grade. Got tattoos all over his chest. Heavy into cocaine, selling it, using it. Done lots of drive-bys, but they got him last time on burglary.

He’s been in CYA for almost two years. They tried him as an adult, but he got a break. He screws up inside, just once, and they ship him to the state pen.

“I done all that stuff for my homeboys,” he tells the kids. “When it comes to jail, none of them come and say, ‘Hey, I told you to do that.’ . . . It’s the same old drive-bys, the same old dope. . . . They take advantage of you. You’re just a piece of meat. . . .

“When you’re out there, doing your killing or whatever, and then you’re on your way home. You think anybody care? They gonna kill your mother, your little brother, sister, bomb your house. They don’t give a. . . . “ The kids have got to know this. They’ve been reading the newspaper these past two weeks, as part of their Shortstop homework assignments.

Here in Santa Ana, gangbangers just killed two teen-agers in a single weekend. Another teen-ager was seriously hurt. An 8-year-old boy was shot while he was sitting at home, watching TV.

A 17-year-old boy was shot to death in Garden Grove on April 30 while he was talking to his girlfriend on a pay phone. The cops say that already this year, the number of gang-related killings in the county has surpassed last year’s estimate of 16. And we’re hardly into May.

Juan’s been in CYA for two years. He’s 21 and the state’s got him--for now--until he’s 25. He’s got a 2-year-old son. He hasn’t seen him since he’s been locked up. He’s in for grand theft auto, for stealing a Corvette.

“They don’t know what I used to do,” Juan says. “On the streets, I would take people. I used to go over to them and stick something in ‘em, shank ‘em. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know if they had kids. I didn’t care.”

Juan had a cocaine habit that cost him $800 a day. He had jobs--in hotels, as an auto mechanic--but he’d lose a lot of time to cocaine. If he needed more money, he says, he’d go stab somebody else.

“Now I’m always shaking,” he says. “I may run into somebody. I’m always watching my back, man. I may have shanked their brother. I don’t even trust my roommate. . . . They got people on the inside. They’re looking for me, man. I gotta watch my back.”

The kids and their parents are listening to this stuff, raptly. They ask questions. One girl asks David, who used to burglarize houses, why his parents just didn’t lay down the law.

“They didn’t know what I was doing, man,” says David, a baby-faced strawberry blond.

“I couldn’t tell my parents what I was into. I have two brothers and a sister that have never been in trouble. I just wanted to hang out with my friends. At night, I would go out to the garage and take the brake off the car, then drive it out of the driveway. If I couldn’t get their car, I would take the neighbor’s.”

When David’s parents found out, they sold their home in Anaheim Hills and moved to Riverside County just so he could hang with a new group of friends. Things got worse. When David went to CYA, his parents moved to Dana Point. They’d given it their best shot.

“I’ve got a friend who was shot dead while he was trying to steal a VCR in somebody’s house,” David says. “His parents were all upset. Said they’d given him everything he could want, how could he steal? He came from a good family too. . . . I came from a good, white school. There were some Mexicans and blacks too, but no gangs. It happens in all groups.”

There are a few of the kids, sitting on squeaky folding chairs, who look as if they don’t care. They look as if what they’re hearing is jive. One kid says on his evaluation of the Shortstop program that what he found least helpful was having to write a eulogy for himself “becuse (sic) I don’t plan to die.”

Nobody ever does, of course. That’s the point that Shortstop, which is operated by the Orange County Bar Foundation, likes to bring home. Most of the time, it works. Just like it seems to be tonight.

Stephen Serna, 15 years old, came with his father, Frank. Stephen lifted a bracelet from Target and got caught.

“I guess it was just there,” Stephen tells me. “I picked it up.”

Stephen, who lives in Placentia, has lots of friends in trouble. Some of them are already in their graves, thanks to the gangs. Two of his older brothers are in jail. The eldest has been in, but now he’s paroled.

“I know what these guys are saying is true,” Stephen says of the “young men” from CYA. “My brothers’ been through the same thing.”

The latest study, done in 1984, shows that about 85% of kids who go through Shortstop stay clean for at least six months. Another, more complete study is about to get under way.

Of course studies can’t compare with the shock of reality being dished out tonight. It makes people squirm. Parents fret.

Guerra, and others, say that the women can get even worse than the men. One mother with desperation in her voice asks the CYA inmates for parenting advice. She sounds as if she hasn’t any idea. Her 13-year-old daughter, she says, is out of control.

After the session is over--and all but one of the kids, a girl, has “graduated”--lots of the kids and parents come up to shake the inmates’ hands.

The men had been talking to me about what it might be like, for them, if they ever get out. All of them except David have been in a gang. They tell me that, really, once you’re in one, it’s for life.

“You go back to your neighborhood, you tell ‘em you don’t want no part, they gonna blow you away,” Juan says.

“You got to be down for the ‘hood,” says 20-year-old Riley, a father of two, sentenced for armed robbery. “Once you in, you in. What you got to do, if you get out, is you got to tell them, ‘I’ll be there for you.’ But you be praying nothing happen. First thing something happen, is they gonna recruit, and you got to go.”

“If you tell them, ‘I can’t do it, man.’ ” adds Juan, “they gonna shoot you right there.”